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Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales in FY08
Rude Awakening wrote with a PC World article, saying that XP sales will actually be higher next year than they were in 2007. Despite Vista's release, Microsoft admitted this week that it expects the previous version of its operating system to make up a larger percentage of its OS sales in 2008. "According to Liddell, Microsoft will generate the same revenue, more or less, under the new Vista vs. XP numbers, although there might be some slight differences because Vista sales have tended to involve more of the higher-priced versions, dubbed premium by the company, than has XP. The financial forecast didn't spell out that directly, however. The only clue was a US$120 million difference in what Microsoft pegged as the 'undelivered elements' it assigned to unearned income for the coming year."
I can think of a couple reasons why XP sales would be higher, both related to the release of Vista. First, you have people who don't want to switch (rather than "upgrade" or "downgrade"--I'm trying not to troll) to Vista, and so they're buying XP while they still can. Secondly, you have people buying computers with Vista, deciding they don't like it, and buying a license of XP instead. And on top of that, many of the Tier 1 OEMs still offer XP as an option. Sometimes it's the default option. And sometimes it's the only option.
I'll admit that this is pure speculation, but if true, I find it interesting that the release of the new, "better than ever" version of a product is driving sales of the old (but still serviceable) version. It kinda reminds me of when Linksys came out with their WRT54G v.5.
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Wow, 78% of sales? That's pretty impressive, considering how many people are actually using Vista.
The Ironic Cynic in me says Microsoft released Vista /EXACTLY/ to increase it's sales of XP :P
Vista is a failure. It always has been, and it still is. Microsoft try to tell you otherwise, but that doesn't make it any less of a failure.
I hope and think that people are starting to realize that newer is not always better, and at the same time realizing that Microsoft doesn't always tell the truth. I also hope and think that this will speed up the adoption of Linux for the desktop, even if it is not quite ready for everybody yet.
(Excuse my English, I am Norwegian.)
I'd vote with my money and buy XP, but then I'd be, you know, voting with my money and buying XP!
Microsoft is admitting that Vista is the Windows ME of this generation?
It's appalling that after 6 years Microsoft has only been able to get out an alpha version of an OS. XP will continue to sell strong and the expectation of a SP3 will add up to those sales.
Vista... well, in a year or so will become a version 1.0 product, with all that means...
"XP is continuing its huge sales performance with even better statisitcs, even though we're thinking about stopping it"
Slashdot says
"Vista is absolutely crap and their new operating system isn't making sales"
Guys, XP sales != Vista lack of sales
Dear Microsoft - you lost me as a customer about 15 seconds into the 'Monkey Boy' video, the day of which I immediately went out and bought a Mac. (serious). My exact thought process was 'I seriously see no future in a company that has a f**king a**hole as a CEO.'
Now how to 'fix' your Vista 'issue' - cut the multiple versions bullsh*t and make 'Ultimate' the only version, and sell it for $120.
Be amazed as profits rocket.
That is all.
Dumbasses.
ps on second thoughts ignore all this and carry on as normal as it's really helping Linux and OSX gain ground.
The article does not claim that XP sales will be higher in FY08 than FY07, just that MS has changed their projection of the proportion of Vista/XP sales for FY08. There's no mention of FY07 at all. Pathetic, truly pathetic.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm sorry, some people will flat out disagree but it sucks. Reasons I think it sucks and I'm going out and getting a copy of XP before they totally yank it is as follows:
* 0x80073712 error in doing updates. I've ran in to this problem and did the registry fix to remove StoreDirty, cleaned out the update download directory, and threw up a voodoo doll on the machine to get Windows Updates to install. From what I've read on their forums and other sites I got as results from my Googling, repair install or reinstall is about the only fix.
* Video drivers, I'm still waiting on a 7900gtx nvidia driver that works properly. I'm not at all happy with Vista's performance and driver compatabilities. I spent over $300 on that card FOR VISTA. Why the hell ain't it working properly on my games which aren't even DX10 games. This is more of an Nvidia problem but it just adds another reason for me to not like Vista.
* Renaming everything. Jesus christ I can't find Add/Remove Programs because it was changed to something else. Consistancy for god sake people! I seriously feel like I did after I first installed a copy of Linux, which runs great, but I had this lost feeling and no clue where anything was.
XP may have had more holes in it but it just WORKED. I can't say the same for Vista at all.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I have been considering purchasing volume licenses for WinXP and office 2003 at the office where I work. (At the moment, they all run the OS that they shipped with and all installs are performed manually and individually.) Volume licensing will enable me to create images and deploy software and system loads consistently and uniformly (not to mention quickly and efficiently). The first annoying thing about this, I discovered, is that I have to buy Vista and Office 2007! I'm told I cannot get WinXP and 2003. So if/when I buy all these seats, they count as numbers in favor of software I have no intention of rolling out.
XP sales will thrive until businesses switch over, which will take some time. And the more saavy businesses will wait for service pack one before switching. This is not surprising - we saw a similar phenomena back when XP came out. Here is an article from as recent as 2005 talking about the slow switchover from 98/2000 to XP http://www.betanews.com/article/Windows_XP_Adoptio n_Rates_Slow/1118943913
I am in the process of learning Vista right now. My first impressions are that there are some things to like (lots of problem diagnosis tools, configuration history tracking, network mapping, etc) and some things that make you scratch your head (I have yet to figure out how to coerce Vista to allow my backup service to start each time I boot - I always have to "give permission". I know I can turn off User Access Control entirely, but that seems a bit draconian and not really "in the spirit" of Vista).
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
No is isn't people are just too stupid to read properly, the article is about microsoft changing their predictions about XP sales for next year from 15% up to 22% and vista from 85% down to 78%.
Its amazing how people can get facts so wrong when its practically written in your face
But . . . but . . . I thought msft was saying that Vista sales were through the roof? Remember, just a few months ago, msft was saying that Vista was selling twice as much as XP sold when XP was first released?
Remember that scene from "The Fugive" ?
U.S. Marshal Erin Poole: Care to revise your statement, sir?
Prison Guard: What?
U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard: Do you want to change your bullshit story!
1. Release crappy OS
2. Sell old OS
3. Profit!!
The ?? has been explained!!
And will continue to do so for a long time.
Windows XP professional will continute to be supported through 2012 or so. I recently bought licenses for a bunch of new machines - Vista licenses, but I used my "downgrade rights" to actually deploy Windows XP pro. I'm sure i'm not the only IT manager doing this. This type of purchasing and deployment may actually inflate sales of Vista.
The reasons were quite simple. Vista has no real benefits to justify the headaches of mandatory activation, V2 profile incompatibility, and absolutely awful network file copy performance.
I'm sure the file copy bug will be resolved in time, but the first two probably won't be.
-ted
First, companies became aware that a finished MS product has at least a SP2 attached to it. Not trolling here, but look back and think for a moment. Which MS OS was really considerably reliable to produce no undesired effects before it was an SP2 version?
Then there's that driver issue. For much legacy hardware, you'll not get certified Vista drivers, or drivers that won't work 100% reliably under Vista. Even for current hardware, you sometimes still have troubles integrating it seamlessly. Not really the fault of MS, just a matter of a lot of very different hardware in existance with manufacturers who're slow to adopt to a market that isn't as large as it was predicted to be.
Then there's TCP/DRM. A lot of people are actually insecure of just how it works, a lot of spin has been delivered and a lot of scare has been dealt. Some of it was justified, but I've heard so much nonsensical BS that I can see why some people think their beloved copied movies will cease to work if they use Vista.
Then there's the licensing model of "phoning home" at least once every 6 months or it stops working. Not to mention the monthly revelation of just what Vista keeps stored and transmits to MS.
And finally that a lot of the new features in Vista are not really a seller. Yes, they're nice to have and offer some value, but nothing new that cannot be achived by third party tools. Many people who want these features will rather try to get a tool for free instead of switching to a new OS.
Bottom line: People prefer to use what they know. Especially when they've learned by now that an MS system takes about 1-2 years after release to be "finished". People don't want to be paying Betatesters anymore. And neither do companies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
With all the sales figures and general negativity about Vista, it's got me wondering if Vista is the modern equilivant for Windows ME. Like Vista ME had a handfull of genuinely usefull features (the high EMS dos mode was a godsend to gamers) but it wasn't considered worth upgrading. With Vista it's the price and the fact it eats resources, with ME it was that it was too unreliable and wasn't worth the upgrade price.
However after ME they came up with XP which, despite what Linux users say, was a huge leap in reliability (generally XP will only crash completely for hardware/driver reasons). Makes you wonder if the next OS MS are working on will be a similar leap.
You must be new here. These smucks never read the articals, they just feed off each other with poor grammer.
...vista sucking will result in promotion for Linux.
..... Remember you are an IT professional and must support your income. When the users see past windows you still can have a go at them via Linux.
Only don't promote Vista as a Linux user, Instead promote it like you work for MS.
Lets all face it, new and improved functionality must be weighed against new and improved problems and user constraints to have to again learn all about and deal with.
Who really wants to do that?
I was resistant to XP when it came out and I have never purchased a copy but use it at work and find it installed on systems people toss and I grab up or systems others give me. Do I like XP better than windows 98? Yes, some, as it has improvements that I could do without but are nicer than windows 98. But it also has irritations I'd rather not have that windows 98 doesn't have.
And that just a comparison of windows to windows. I use Linux 90%, or better, of the time at home. I have used Knoppix, still have it installed on one system but use ubuntu on my main system. (having drive trays is useful as I can swap out for windows98 as I have purchased several third party software packages and installed them on windows 98).
Of the windows XP boxes, I use one briefly for bellsouth/AT&T and linksys router control, because they only support windows (idiots). But I can and do run the live cd of linux dynebolic on them.
I have numerious systems including several PPC macs pre-osx and one imac post osx (interesting machine).
I have systems that have MS DOS - pre-windows and later versions and onece had to deal with MS ME trash.
Somewhere I have a MFM drive dual bootable (probably doesn't spin anymore) with old Minix on it.
I still have an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 4000/toaster system.
The point is: I've tried a lot of different system, more than mentioned.
But what do I really want of an OS?
Of course I want a wide range of quality software I'm interested in, to run on it, thats a given.
The Amiga is the closest, and I'd probably like BeOS too.
But the problem here is that they are no longer reasonably supported and off shoots like AROS and BeOS's open source versions are yet to reach production level.
DragonFly BSD seems promising as does the Hurd and Minix 3, but they too lack in current state.
Overall I am greatly disappointed with the computer industry in regards to Operating Systems.
All things weighed, GNU/Linux currently gets the most points, But I don't consider it 100% Free Software, as there really are a lot of built in constraints.
100% FreeSoftware will only happen when software is easy enough to create that most anyone can do it, just as today most anyone can use a calculator.
Windows is very much the opposite of free, and the most pathetic example of MS dumbing down the users (a crime against consumers) is changing the names of applications and functionality and in general taking away functionality that should be considered fundamental. Philosophy being - make the users think they are stupid while giving teh professionals more to re-learn and charge for.
While GNU/Linux applies has it constraints one what the users can do for themselves.
So promote Vista
And remember, when this barbaric OS mentality is finally overcome, it won't matter to you cause you long be dead.
I bought my niece a computer that she wanted. It only came with Vista. I ordered it anyway.
The machine arrived from Dell yesterday. I fired it up to see Vista. The damn thing blue-screened on first boot. It has since booted fine.
This tells me that either the software is broken, or the hardware is. Either way, it is going back for a refund.
Nice job, Dell. Nice job, MS.
Vista is a failure. It always has been, and it still is. Microsoft try to tell you otherwise, but that doesn't make it any less of a failure.
...
(Excuse my English, I am Norwegian.)
Have soimeone translate this for you: "An accurate technical description of Microsoft Vista can be found in any good guide to computing under the heading 'clusterfuck'."
BTW, does Norway have a Bikini Team? It should!
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
So...you don't want to use Linux because it's harder to program for it than to use a calculator, and thus misses one of your requirements for being free software.
WTF?
I see the barrier to entry argument, but while that can be lowered slightly, programming is inherently difficult. Not everyone could do it, and some people can program much better than others.
Be happy when there are no *artificial* barriers to entry. There's jack you can do about natural barriers to entry.
I'm a consultant and get to talk with IT folks in various organizations. When I ask their opinion of Vista, it's like they just sucked on a lemon. XP is bad enough -- a lot of their computers are still running 2000 -- but Vista is not an option. There are two reasons: hardware drivers that they've heard are either buggy or unavailable for existing equipment, and the inability of existing computers to run it. Not to mention the high cost of new computers capable of running it. Everyone has gotten used to being able to buy cheap, name-brand machines for the organization. Then there's the concern about mixing Vista with XP in the organization. Supporting the users on Vista is no slam-dunk.
It will take a while for these organizations to start buying into the whole Vista thing, and will only happen once the older computers and peripherals are retired. Until then, and only then, XP will remain the preferred operating system over Vista. This shouldn't be earth-shaking news, since a lot of old companies are still using older versions of windows (I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a few Windows 98 and NT4 installations out there), and are only now considering a migration to XP. Microsoft justs needs to have a little patience. Vista will start gaining traction with these organizations in 2009.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
* Video drivers, I'm still waiting on a 7900gtx nvidia driver that works properly. I'm not at all happy with Vista's performance and driver compatabilities. I spent over $300 on that card FOR VISTA. Why the hell ain't it working properly on my games which aren't even DX10 games. This is more of an Nvidia problem but it just adds another reason for me to not like Vista.
Here is the explanation, why it takes so long: Vista's Content Protection: In short, apparently it is very difficult to make a proper video driver for Vista.If this can be confirmed, then I hope Microsoft takes the hint... their PR always says if there really was a better alternative, that more people would buy that one.
stuff |
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
So people paid a lot of money on hardware to run Vista but would never do that to run say ...GNU/Linux ?
I mean think about it , if everybody that upgraded for Vista put their money in a jar , said I'll buy this GFX card and this and that. Those hardware manufacturers would have actually worked on a driver , merged in the kernel and everybody had a 100% fully functional GNU/Linux PC for only the cost of the hardware , whereas for Vista they would have also paid for the operating system itself.
But wait , what about games you say ? People were paying for the hardware to run DirectX 10 games,not older ones , hence game developers would have had to develop these new games , what if they developed them under OpenGL instead ? (and worked with the guys creating DirectX 10 GFX cards to create something open for Linux instead).
These are also reasons as to why people are discouraged from switching to Linux or Mac, but if they have to deal with these problems while upgrading to Vista, some people might decide that they might as well switch to Linux/Mac (which have more substantial advantages over XP than Vista does).
If given choice, I'd buy new computer without any OS at all and run linux on it, but if I had to choose between microsoft systems, I'd buy XP SP2 over Vista anytime.
XP is just much more tested, stable and user friendly than Vista.
Vista does not offer anything which would benefit home users by upgrading.
Like all other MS operating systems, Vista won't be useable before service pack X,
where x seems to range from 1 to 6.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
They might have gotten the facts wrong, but they got the statistics right!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
1.Adding extra crap just to keep the movie studios and record companies happy
2.Adding features that make Vista appear to be more secure instead of features that actually make it more secure.
3.Changing the driver model and forcing hardware vendors to rewrite the drivers
4.Too many editions. Aeroglass should have been part of Home Basic with the media crap (like DVD authoring, HD movie maker, media center etc) and other Home Premium addons being released as a seperate extra pack. Enterprise should not exist as a seperate edition. BitLocker and other features should have been added to vista Business. Enterprise would then only exist as a modified version of Business capable of running in "I can install this to all my machines and have them activate off my corporate license server without having to activate them all manually" type mode. So have Vista Home, Vista Addons (all the stuff currently in Home Premium), Vista Business and Vista Ultimate (plus the no media player versions of Home and Business)
and 5.Vista attempts to make a "clean break" in some areas (e.g. with the new Windows Presentation Foundation UI toolkit) yet it is still full of a decade or more of cruft. Why can't Microsoft pull an Apple and do a clean slate new set of APIs and run the old APIs as a seperate subsystem (similar to how Services For Unix works) which talks to the new APIs.
Deviate_X provides fanboy irony:
Its amazing how people can get facts so wrong when its practically written in your face.
Ah, but the more fundamental observation is that M$'s new OS did not drive sales or growth. As noticed by The Register, M$ has managed to grow despite Vista but not by much.
I've got a few images to help people like you get the idea. You will have to adjust your bay image settings to remove your corporate blinders, because someone marked these images as offensive within seconds of their post. Study carefully:
As Vista tanks, so does M$'s option pyramid scheme. They are already missing their own expectations, soon they will be missing Wall Street's, then it's all over for them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I not surprise that people are choosing XP over Vista. Windows user have weathered a stormy 6 years with XP. People as a whole have learn to secure the OS and I haven't heard of a major malware outbreak in years. No one going to abandon a devil they know for one they don't . Instead of foisting Vista on the consumer, continue to sell both and let people naturally migrate over to Vista. If Vista is truly better than XP, people will migrate. Microsoft would be wise to use the time to listen to user feedback and continue to improve Vista incrementally. Microsoft has the monopoly so they won't lose anything in that scenario.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The ridiculous hardware requirements.
You want a machine with bare minimum 2 GB of RAM and a very fast CPU to run Vista Home Premium edition properly. Meanwhile, Windows XP Professional works quite well with as little as 768 MB of system RAM with an Intel Celeron 466 MHz CPU. My current home machine running an AMD Athlon CPU clocked at 1.664 GHz and 1.5 GB of RAM runs Windows XP Pro extremely well, and I don't see the point of upgrading to Windows Vista.
No one here likes you, everyone thinks you're a twat (which is really saying something on Slashdot). When are you going to stop posting?
The upgrade train is out of steam. M$ has lost it's ability to force broken new crap onto it's customers. There is nothing subtlety about Vista and Office 2007's push. Vista obsoleted 95% of the PCs on the market at release and came with a GUI harder to figure out than KDE. Office 2007 not only foist a new file format on a market striving for sane standards like ODF, it pushed a brand new GUI. People don't want these things and have rejected Vista. M$'s position is going to get worse as their channels continue to revolt and $200 laptops running free software flood the market.
Good bye M$. The world will be a better place without your NDAs, format wars and legislative corruption.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here is a diagram to explain this situation. -=Joke=- 0 /|\
You
As you can see, the joke is passing rapidly over your head.
i would like to know where they are getting it. i went to buy ms office for xp a few weeks ago and every store i went to said that ALL xp programs were pulled now that vista is out. i have even looked on the the and i can't find any xp discs or programs. in the end i have to STEAL it. do you hear that ms??? i had to STEAL a program i wanted to buy. i just bought a new xp disc 9 months ago (which is bs because i thought i was buying the program, not the disc. my disc got scratched and i had to purchase a whole new program.) and i'll be damned if i am going to be forced into buying vista and vista office just so that i can get a new copy of ms word. i think ms is being run by the gravy robbers. --adultswim reference.
educate yourself...
http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html
The artificial barriers are keeping us all away from using the natural barriers to our advantage.
With correct understanding of the natural barriers, we can do a lot more and that includes users as well.
Math is inherently difficult to, especially if you are using the roman numeral system to do it with.
But we have this new abstraction set we use instead. Its called the decimal system with its "only a fool would think nothing can have vale" zero place holder.
Likewise, Programming has the same actions constants as anything else we do, especially in dealing with abstractions.
Math is not a process of putting blocks together anymore than programming is, but the basis of all math is simple addition. Likewise, the application of the action constants in programming, though having a basis on simple concepts, can most certainly be used in a manner beyond "adding blocks together" but of being dynamic.
So, educate yourself!
First: Deprogram yourself in your thinking (to use the analogy) it foolish that nothing can have value. Deprogram yourself from thinking what you were taught in regards to programming is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because truth is not the whole picture that you will find in honesty.
Second: Know yourself! Learn how to recognize yours and others application of the action constants, that nobody can avoid using, no matter what you or they do.
Third: Apply your new awareness of your use of the action constants along with what you were taught about programming .
And realize programming today is barbaric, arrogant and limiting as to what we could be accomplishing.
Not to mention voiding once and for all, via common knowledge, software patents.
... j/k - we know the answer to that.
In all seriousness, isn't it _about time_ that we get a SP3 release.
I had to perform an reinstall for a friend's HP and it took about 24 hrs straight of downloading, installing, rebooting...rinse and repeat. No exaggeration at all - 24-stinkin- hours to go from SP1 to SP2 then to get all the updates. It's soooo sad...
I also updated her linux distro - 2.5 hrs to perform the install, connect to synaptic, and get all the updates and customize the experience.
A few more reinstalls of XP and I just might REFUSE to mess with MS OSes. I'm not asking for much - How about an SP3 already?????
My big issue with Vista is that it doesn't let network admins do their job. UAC is a major pain in the ass obstacle that treats everyone like some n00b who doesn't know how to use a computer. It takes me 5 minutes to do in Vista what would have taken me 20 seconds in XP.
If you want to consistently throw a BSOD on Vista, try syncing an iPod. I'm going to wait until they come out with a SP2 to re-evaluate this crappy OS.
The game.
Well, I won't call you "too stupid to read properly", but what about this (FTFA):"Windows XP sales will, in other words, be nearly 50 percent higher in the next 12 months than Microsoft had estimated earlier."
Hmmm, "50% higher" sales for XP looks fairly significant to me...
Caveat Utilitor
So....they'd have made more $$$ if they hadn't bothered developing Vista?
If they'd just sacked most of their developers in 2001 and kept on selling XP they'd have made far more money.
No sig today...
I manage an office supply store, and I have probably sold twice as many copies of XP OSes as I did before Vista came out. I have talked to other stores in the district, and they have noticed the same thing, so at a retail level, I can definitely see this happening.
Hmmm, "50% higher" sales for XP looks fairly significant to me...
The old prediction for XP was 15% of OS sales, and now it's 22%. 15 * 1.5 = 22.5, so phrasing it as "nearly 50% higher" is just a more confusing way of saying the same thing. It's rather like the old trick of basing "budget cuts" on planned expenditures for the coming year, even if the "cut" actually results in higher expenditure than in the previous year.
Microsoft still expect Vista to vastly outsell XP in the coming year, which represents a massive increase in Vista sales, together with a sharp fall in XP sales. XP sales simply aren't going to fall as much as Microsoft had previously estimated, but make no mistake about it, XP sales are dramatically falling, not rising, whereas Vista sales are increasing at a fairly rapid clip.
This doesn't even account for people who buy Vista, and then downgrade to XP legally. At my business, we have at least 20 computers that were purchased with Vista, but we immediately RIS them back down to XP. Same for Office 2007 (Downgraded to 2003 for the time being). Of course, we can always upgrade back to Vista later on, but we don't have any plans for that in the near future.
Y2K
Year 9 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Score
infome-|8 0 0 0 0 1^1*7 0 0 0 0 9^
ercials|
sun -|0 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 4*4*4*7
space -|0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1*
tropo -|0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 9^4*0
sphere |
clouds-|0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3
trees -|2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 8
roof -|6 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 9 4 0
base -|0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
ment |
GNU -|3 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Theo -|9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 9 4 0 0 0
theRat|
HURD -|0 0 9 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 0 0 0
& Mach |
inerpr-|0 9 1 0 0 0 8 0 9 0 0 0 0
etiveda|
nce |
turtle-|7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8^
necks |
sweaty-|0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 5 0 0 0
palms |
Balmer-|1 6 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 5 0 0
Kanzass-|5 5 5 5 5 5 4 5 8 0 0 0 0
Arkanz-|4 7 4 7 4 7 2 4 6 3 3 3 5
ass
Score
9 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Year 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Y2K
Legend
1~Linux sales
2~XP
3~Vista
4~Pirates
5~Ninjas
6~John Candy
7~IPv6
8~RIAA,MPAA,RJ11,NBAACP,BATF-ECES
9~United Nations Agenda 21
0~CowboyNeal
*=Beowulf cluster
^=government leverage
It seems the main selling point for Vista is DX10 exclusivity, which is aimed at gamers.
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But Vista is slower than XP for games and now it appears that Vista has a second problem, it memory maps the entire Video memory into user address space, wasting this precious resource:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Also this is not done for performance reasons, but seems to be part of Microsofts efforts to tighten the DRM screws.
So vista gives gamers DX10 which is currently pointless, slows performance and steals address space leading to more crashes. Yay Vista.
Yuk.
Requisite bad car analogy: The incorporation of numerous 'advances' in automotive technology have fueled a healthy market for older models.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sadly, it looks more like the joke decapitated him. :(
Sure they are, under the duress of it being the default available system. Obviously the point is that you are trying to minimize MS' only-too-obvoius folly. But you have failed to understand that we don't do that here, this is /.!
Caveat Utilitor
Jerry, have you personally used Vista? The example of your companies IT department was useful, but the rest of your comment was well..... FUD (sorry to say, but your fighting FUD with FUD).
I'd like to hear from people who have 1st person experiences, or 2nd hand experiences from someone they trust.
Your post has better English in it than the posts of some allegedly native-English speaking AC's I've seen here.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Grammar. FGT.
Were they not going to discontinue XP at the end of this year?
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
and I hate it. I tried to use it for one month, then went back to XP (I even had to buy another XP licence).
I reinstalled vista in vmware in order to keep on trying it and get used to it, but I can't. It is hard to say why, but I just keep hating vista.
I've run Linux for years on my server and windows (98, 2000, XP) on my desktops. But if the XP option would dissapear and vista would be the only windows option, I guarantee: either I switch to a mac with OSX, or I would start using Linux for my desktop as well.
It's not a matter of minimising, it's a matter of fact. XP sales are dropping, Vista sales are rising, full stop. Whatever the excuses (e.g. users are buying Vista under duress) or qualifications (e.g. Microsoft's predictions have been changed in a way that's unfavourable to Vista) may be, that reality is unchanged.
/., using a title that implies the opposite of what the figures in the article actually suggest is bad form.
The title for this article is "Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales in FY08". To the casual reader, this implies stronger sales in FY08, as compared to FY07, when in fact the opposite is the case. Judging by the posts, a lot of those who didn't bother to read the article have clearly been misled by this deceptive title. Even on
microsoft has just posted record breaking profits and sales revenue beating the analysts in the both the last two quarters
In an inflationary economy, anything less than "record breaking" is a decline. Declines are just fine for most businesses, but M$ pays a large share of their salary in terms of stock options and depends on perpetual growth to keep going.
how the register managed to spin that against vista would be amazing if it wasn't so transparent.
If it's transparent, tell me what's wrong with it. The fact is that Vista's release made no difference to M$'s bottom line, despite it's cost. At the very least, M$ has a return on investment problem because their OS no longer pays for it's creation. At the very worst, the lack of growth makes M$'s loss of power evident. They can't make money off the upgrade treadmill anymore and are out of room for growth.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
those were some of the worst Photoshopped images I've ever seen.
They were made like QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System M$ has made it's fortune shoving in everyone's face. Think old Bill would like to buy these too?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Most of the machines I see pitched in catalogs are in the $700 range, certainly under $1,000," said Cherry. "Computers with that amount of hardware are a better fit for XP. With Vista's requirements, people may be thinking about sticking with XP, and putting less money into the hardware."
OK, let's put this into perspective. We're not talking about some processor-hungry application here, we're talking about the overhead of teh OS itself.
Several years ago I was dual-booting FreeBSD and Windows on my main computer. It had 128M of RAM and an unaccelerated video card. It was getting time to upgrade, so I got a used Powermac G3 and added a G4 upgrade card and installed Jaguar on it. Jaguar was specced for a minimum of 256MB RAM and really required about 128M more than that to be happy. I was able to get 768MB of old RAM for that box cheap, and that was fine. I transferred all my UNIX stuff to it, it was faster than my old dual boot box, but I had that as a backup. I upgraded to a Mac mini when that came out, with 512MB of RAM running Panther, and it was so much faster even though it had less RAM. By this time my old dual boot box was only ever running Windows. With 256MB and a geforce 4 Ti-200 and perfectly reasonable for most of the Windows apps I needed to run.
I was a little annoyed that OSX required more memory than Windows. I'd been accustomed to mainstream UNIX that had gone from being "bloated" (since it required several hundred KILObytes to run and OVER A MEGABYTE to be happy) to being "lightweight" (Kids today, you tell them about punch cards and drum memory and they believe you, you tell them about running a desktop with a GUI in less than a megabyte and they think you're kidding), with Windows being the memory hog... but Windows was working well on a system that I knew OSX would balk at if it was a Power PC.
But I had applications that needed more than that.
So a year or so ago I put together what I thought was a pretty nice computer, with 2GB of RAM, a dual core Athlon 64 CPU, a gf7600 video card, and it was under $600. If anything, I thought I was going pretty gold-plated.
So I'm completely boggled at the idea that an "under $1000" computer would be considered inadequate for Vista. He's just talking about the *extra overhead* of the OS here, the applications (which for me had been what was driving my hardware requirements) would be the same on XP and Vista... what the HELL is Vista doing that makes this kind of machine "inadeqate"?
It's NOT just the eye candy. I already took the "eye candy" hit when I switched from FreeBSD/Windows to OSX. My first generation Mac mini with a 1.42 MHz PPC and 512M RAM and a 32M Radeon 9200 GPU handles all the eye candy I can stand _just_fine_. The GPU isn't good enough for the Quartz Extreme effects, but it's one that was 'trailing edge' when I got the computer _three_years_ ago. I can't imagine what kind of eye candy they could be including that any desktop or laptop HOWEVER CHEAP sold in the past three years (let alone on sale today) would have a problem with.
So just what is it that Vista requires that brings _the_OS_requirements_ up from the 256M RAM and a geforce 4 to something that my "cheap and nasty" six-hundred-dollars-over-a-year-ago 2GB plus geforce 7600 box would supposedly balk at? Or is this guy just making excuses for Microsoft?
They've managed to spin a damning indictment of the R&D, sales, and marketing costs of a new OS into "strong sales figures" for their old product. Do we now know where Alastair Campbell went after his tenure in Downing Street?
On a more serious note, this isn't a surprise. Corporate is still using XP, some OEMs are still using XP, people who don't like Vista are buying XP while they still can, the HW requirements of Vista make XP the only option for many older machines, et c..
There are limits to the degree to which you can abstract an issue while retaining functionality. In point of fact, almost every abstraction is a loss of power. C doesn't allow you to write programs that are as optimal as assembly language (unless you actually use inline assembly language); most other programming languages don't allow you to do pointer arithmetic. What would you have to give up in order to get a programming language that is as easy to use as a calculator?
And why are calculators easy to use? Because they only have a limited number of functions. A typical calculator can add, subtract, multiply, or divide the last number calculated with the number inputted, turn on and off, and clear its input. A scientific calculator adds another fifteen or twenty functions.
A programming language does input and output through the console, a GUI, a network, or a disk; stores an arbitrary number of arbitrary values; and does arbitrary operations on them. (Yes, there's a very limited number of operations that the language gives; but you'll have a standard library to learn, and that is much larger. Besides which, the user defines their own operations in any non-trivial work.)
There's a lot to be done to make programming easier, but the only thing that could bring programming to the masses is people getting used to increased complexity, especially at an early age.
As for your example with Arabic versus Roman numerals, it's having ranked digits where each rank could be computed separately, independent of which symbols surrounded it. If you see 1, it always means 1, never -1. (Though I've seen texts that use IIII rather than IV.) And because the same symbols are used for the same value regardless of rank. If the Romans had had a symbol for zero, well, they could have simply written 'nullus' and be done with it. But the system of digits and ranks was the advantage.
I know it's been said many times. I've tried to be very tolerant of Vista - but it's just plain awful to use. It's slow and on 5 separate occasions, it's deleted the wrong files (I still don't know why - i've NEVER deleted the wrong file in the last **15** years - so why Vista has done it 5 times, I don't know. I think it's a bug in the keyboard navigation in explorer that's the problem and only occurs when I select multiple files).
Vista goes down in my books as "close to Windows ME" - a monumental failure - but it doesn't crash as much.
1999 called, he wants his doom predictions back. "XP is not selling, everyone is sticking with 2000, Microsoft will go bankrupt soon" and so on and so forth.
Ballmer would be dancing in the streets if Vista was doing as well as XP did, but it's not. There's a steady decline here and Vista is right in line.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not even sure you understand what you've written, but by this metric Google is in trouble, since they just missed earnings. Hell, Oracle and IBM must be at the brink as well.
No, "M$" does not pay a large share of salaries as stock options. Please provide proof of this, seriously. That must be public knowledge, if it's true.
Way to go twitter. I love the way you word it, but please explain to us poor simpletons how this is different than any other corporation? This is so idiotic. It's equivalent to saying organisms depend on breathing to go on living.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Yes, if I was to draw another diagram, the Preview Button would be passing quickly over my head.
Of course at this point Vista's main competitor is still Windows XP, another Microsoft operating system. How's that crusade going so far?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
"M$" does not pay a large share of salaries as stock options. Please provide proof of this, seriously. That must be public knowledge, if it's true. ... how this is different than any other corporation?
It's all public knowledge but so is free software. People don't always know what's public and government regulators are asleep at the wheel, or colluding.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Vista sales have tended to involve more of the higher-priced versions, dubbed premium by the company, than has XP."
Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that this is the only reason Vista exists?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So do you have something else? From this millenium, preferably?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Microsoft changed their compensation structures along with everyone else after the Enron/Tycho/Worldcom debacles. That was... hmm, I think 2002 maybe.
Yeah, it's hard to entice people with worthless paper but I did miss the memo. What else do they have to keep people from leaving for Google?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You might want to update your spam about Microsoft paying its employees in stock options, since the company stopped issuing them four years ago: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/july-dec03/ stocks_7-10.html.
Oh, big news there. Update from "options" to "restricted" is noted. Thanks.
I'm sure you can imagine other reasons why Microsoft is on the verge of collapse, and probably has been in your minds for years now (but funnily enough, just never seems to collapse)
Well, thanks Dr. AC, but that has not been on my mind for years. The obvious superiority of free software has been on my mind for about seven years, and I've expected a shift but I'm a slow learner. It took me a couple of years to realize that M$ must be destroyed. It's Vista and Office 2007, which are so obviously a play from the early 90's book of software, that have convinced me the end is near for them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I didn't think people like you really existed outside of COLA and places like that, but I guess I was wrong.
I am surprised at the constant Vista bashing. I've been running Vista since its release, and have yet to experience the issues others mention here. I have a copy running on my desktop (AMD x2, Nvidia 8600, 4gb ram) and on my laptop (Compaq v2000). The only problem I encountered was with the first video card I used(an Nvidia Quadro NVS with shared memory), and this was due to poor drivers (Nvidia did not release 64 bit drivers for this, so had to run the default MS ones). Since upgrading my video card (the Quadro was a temp while I waited for DX10 cards to be released), I have had *zero* problems. I find Vista to be stable in many respects better than XP. Some of the things I prefer with Vista over XP: 1. Better battery management on my laptop. 2. Better standby / resume. 3. The "live preview" window (when you mouse over minimized / hidden windows on the taskbar). 4. Better memory management (4gb memory with a 64 bit OS). 5. Playing a video over RDC with Vista actually plays it at regular viewable framerates vs the stuttery framerate on XP. 6. Improved UI (this is of course subjective). I have 3 copies of XP and 2 copies if Vista (all legal). I wouldn't consider going back to XP. I'd say Vista is definately a step up from XP. Is my experience an exception to the norm? Perhaps; but I'm more inclined to think that a lot of the Vista "issues / bashing" is due to MS hating and / or from Linux fanboys.
I'm a Linux tinkerer from way back, and RHCT, but I run Windows on my desktop. Two weeks ago I decided to buy Windows Vista Ultimate for AUD$250 OEM which I thought was a good deal. I've installed it, and have experienced very few bugs. I've been pretty impressed actually, especially for a new OS with no service packs.
.mov files, that were definitely not open by any other program (I even rebooted and uninstalled itunes, quicktime and quicktime alternative). In the end I deleted the files via CLI. I've converted the few .mov files I had to AVI (Xvid + lame mp3), using the great free mediacoder program.
After I installed the OS I updated all my applications to the latest versions, and so far it's all been great. I held off 6 months after release as I wanted my fav appications to catch up - like ZoneAlarm, AVG Free, Nero and some others. With the latest versions (and latest drivers), pretty much everything works perfectly. The file browser is so much improved on XP.
The only 2 things I've discovered that annoy me are this-
1. The file browser would hang when I tried deleting
2. There were some bugs with rendering movie icons in the file browser. That *might've* been because I didn't have the best 3rd party codecs installed at the time. I've found some Vista codec pack since and haven't had a problem.
So there's some bugs here and there but on the whole, if you update your applications i think you'll be fine and have no issues. If you're stuck with older apps that aren't updated for vista then you might be in trouble, but hey stick with XP in that case.
I think Vista is just coping flack getting blamed for things that are actually 3rd party application or driver issues. I used to be a Vista basher right up until i installed it, as the last time I'd used Vista was Beta2 when it was a free download, and that was pretty buggy, and third party apps hadn't caught up yet.
That's "if I were to draw"... smuck!
I must be one of the 5 people on earth who run Vista (Business Edition) and can count the problems I've had on one hand. 1. Netgear discontinued my network adaptor less than a year after release and won't make Vista drivers (XP drivers work 90%... and this is Netgear's fault, not MS). 2. Add/Remove Programs was renamed. I look for it every time. 3. UAC had to be turned off for me to keep my sanity. Granted, every single component on my PC is less than 3 months old (my GeForce 8800GTS is the oldest part), but I'm sorry, I won't be going back to XP.
I live in a place where those who live forever come to die.
And also in 2008, Microsoft sees the "database filesystem", and "perfect speech recognition"! Am I glad 2007 is over, with its gloomy forecasts that Microsoft would just lie about vaporware to keep people buying its increasingly shabby and prematurely obsolete product rehashes.
Wait, it's just a bug in my Windows taskbar calendar?
--
make install -not war
I'd say you are a bit lost in all the overcomplexifabulactions you perceive to exist. In fact you have gotten so overwhelmed that you forgot to mention input/output with printers and more devices than I or you know about.
.net. You can write programs using any number of languages. Then it is translated into a Common Intermediate Language (CIL) which is then run off a run time engine which does the final translation into binary perceivable by the hardware.
It took three hundred year for the wide spread application the Hindu-Arabic system, after it was introduced.
In comparison it took about 350 years for the catholic church to finally accept Galileo's observations.
This happened in the early 1990's and to verify I mean like less than 20 years ago.
Why? Politics of course! The church changed because they were losing supporters because of their silly position of punishing someone who was being apparently more honesty than they. Mathematics change took generations to overcome the politics and population growth enough to make fail the roman numeral systems use in mathematics and accounting (numbers got to big). Today the Computer Science courses are losing Students and trying to recapture interest. Some example are "Computational Thinking" and "Great Principles of Computing" efforts (google them).
What might a Roman Numeral Accountant promote in order to protect their elite social status and income? Only a fool would think nothing can have value. And so it is often the case of wrong teachings that program people to think in terms that limit their ability to comprehend what more is possible. Fixing that requires deprogramming.
Programming is the act of automating complexity and supplying it an easier to use interface so the user of the complexity can use and reuse it and even incorporate it in other automations of complexity. It is a recursive act.
Regardless of what programming language you use, the machine needs to see transistor states and changes of on or off. As a first level abstraction, we call this binary. For any program you write, regardless or what language you write it in or any other factors such as interpreted or compiled etc., the hardware needs to see binary. The fundamental technology upon what a computer is built is the two state transistor providing three states, on, off and not accessed.
There is translation involved in programming, perhaps even multiple levels of translations.
program written in programing language x -----> translation levels ---> binary machine perspective.
If you want to get all complexifabulcated as to what goes on in the translation levels for any particular language, then you are being to subjective to the area of problem and will only perhaps see symptoms of the problem, not the cause.. You have to be objective, step away to see a bigger picture, in order to see the problem.
Microsoft tried to quantize the more common and popular programming languages. Anyone could have done this, but MS was most likely as they do not innovate but rather try to own and/or control what others have done. They didn't even own MSDOS when they sold it to IBM. Of course there is the MS bias of application of the summing.
Anyways, MS produced out of the summing of programing languages the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure).
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-335.htm
It was the summing of programming concepts and data-type with the integration done to avoid conflicts. This is at the core of what is better know as
You mentioned symptoms of the problem such as:
"In point of fact, almost every abstraction is a loss of power." That is not a fact at all. It is abstraction that enables us to do more. If there is any power loss it is only as a result of losing touch with, or access to, the elements of the abstraction ladder. And that is a symptom of the problem
It may not mean Vista is tanking at all. It could just mean that people have installed both operating systems on their computers. People are becoming more savy about diving into the next new thing. They may just want to experiment with Vista until the service packs come out, and keep the tried and true XP as thier fail safe. That would be double money for MicroSofty when people buy their shiney new laptops.
And monkeys might drive down my avenue.
I got an email last week from TigerDirect. They were selling a whiz-bang bare-bones system for a fairly low price. A couple of things stood out:
1. They were selling it without an OS at all!
2. The ad said something like: "You're gonna need an OS. Add WindowsXP Home for $149.95 or WindowsVista Home for $119.95." That might have been a misprint, but I read it over a coupla times to make sure it wasn't me misreading it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a misprint, but rather, the result of the fact that "Big Brother Bill's OS Shop" is really trying to get folks to buy Vista, even to the extent of discounting it 20% compared to its predecessor, or, of course, raising the price of XP....
24 hours? That's either an exageration, or your friend has a 28K dialup connection that's powered by hamsters. I've brought XP base installs to SP2 in a matter of 3 or 4 hours.
Amnesty International
sorry, no exaggeration at all - I had SP1 on an HP and the dumb thing did a bunch of updates to SP1, rebooted, updates because of the new updates, rebooted, "Hey how about some more updates", downloaded a bunch of updates, it then realized "Hey how about SP2", downloaded SP2, installed SP2, rebooted, "hey you've got SP2, how about some more updates and some newer applications," downloaded, installed, rebooted, "hey you've got some newer updates that allow you to get some even newer updates", downloaded, installed, rebooted, and one more update to finish it off and it was done - sorry you don't agree but I'm not exaggerating - I might be off in my estimation by 2-3 hrs but that's about it. Maybe it's an HP/MS thing but that's what it was.
;-) - Yes, the connection is a slow one but not terribly slow - DSL 1Mbit I believe.
Normally, I just download SP2, slipstream, and then run Autopatcher or slipstream the updates via Nlite but I wasn't going to take those types of chances with this HP machine - I figured, I'd let MS take a whack at it considering HP only provided SP1 updates.
Sorry you don't believe the time - but I learned long ago when working in the food services industry - no matter what you do, there will always be someone that isn't happy
I am a software engineer who has worked on certifying RAID drivers to be compatible with Microsoft's operating systems. I can say that it is a job from hell. The difficulty in certification and testing is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers concentrate mostly on building new hardware that is compatible with existing drivers cheaper rather than creating new hardware that requires expensive driver development to support Windows.
I am starting to feel that reading posts from Anonymous Coward is a waste of time. How much credibility do you have if you are not willing to sign your posting. I understand if you are an insider needing the protection, but I don't see that here.
Not in UK English.